Cutty Sark 

An Invited Friend of the Harrison Butler Association 
The boat built in 1925 to a design by Albert Strange

The Advert from 1929

Cutty Sark : An Albert Strange Designed Boat's Story
I first came across a reference to an Albert Strange designed boat called Cutty Sark in April 2018 when searching through digitised old Australian newspapers. The advertisement from The Sydney Morning Herald, dated Saturday 17th August 1929, referred to a boat that was not in the records of the Albert Strange Association. Cutty Sark was, unfortunately, a popular name for a boat in the 1920s which made searching for more information difficult. The best that I managed at the time was the photograph below is of a sloop called Cutty Sark, thought to be taken in 1925 by William James Hall, probably at the annual Pittwater Regatta. I wondered if the sail number A40 may help establish if it was the same boat.

Is this the Cutty Sark in the advertisement ?

The Last Voyage of Cutty Sark
Over a year later, August 2019, when reading Offshore, an old Australian sailing magazine from 1974, I came across an article titled “The Last Voyage of Cutty Sark”. With a mixture of pleasure and pain I realised that the article was referring the boat I'd stumbled across previously. The pleasure stemmed from the following key paragraph in the six page article; “Cutty Sark was built 45 years ago up the Parramatta River. She was an Albert Strange design, a 30 ft, originally gaff-rigged auxiliary cutter.”
The pain came from the remainder of the article in which the crew of the Cutty Sark were taken off during an unexpectedly furious storm off the coast of New South Wales in May 1974 by the destroyer HMAS Swan. Another yacht, Nimbus Too, was not found and her father and son crew perished. Cutty Sark's wreckage was later found washed ashore.
Of course, this does not prove that Cutty Sark was built in an authentic manner to an Albert Strange design, but it does show that she was, throughout her life, believed to be just that.
A PDF of the full article is provided in the links section, below.

Cutty Sark Statistics
Built : 1925
LOA : 30' 0"
LWL : --' -"
Beam : 9' 0"
Draught : -' -"
Design N° --
Displacement : - ton 

Cutty Sark Custodians & Home Ports 
John H Alsop (?-1974)
Scott (?-1929-?) Newport, Sydney, Australia

Cutty Sark Links
• The Last Voyage of the Cutty Sark (1974) 

Page last updated : August 2019

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